The year rolls on and the autumn mists roll in and a new edition of Whewell’s Gazette, the weekly #histSTM links list, rolls onto your monitor screen bringing with it all the histories of science, technology and medicine that could be netted in the deep seas of cyberspace over the last seven days.

Before STS there was HPS, the history and philosophy of science, and one of this discipline’s true giants, Mary Hesse, left us on the 2 October. She received a doctorate in electron microscopy from Imperial College, London in 1948 and a master of science from University College London a year later. Initially she lectured in mathematics at Royal Holloway College (1947-1951) and then the University of Leeds (1951-1955) before teaching history and philosophy at University College (1955-1959). In 1960 she moved to the University of Cambridge where she remained until her death last week.

Her most influential work was Models and Analogies in Science published in 1963. However my own personal Mary Hesse moment came from reading the earlier Forces and Fields from 1961. I had become aware that Newton had not pulled the concept of force out of his hat like a conjuror producing a rabbit but that this concept had an evolutionary history. I knew enough to know that Kepler had supposedly been the first, in the Early Modern Period, to replace the medieval concept of a living force (anima) with a purely physical one (vir) and I wished to learn more. Searching around I found two books, both of them now recognised as classics, Richard Westfall’s Force in Newton’s Physics: the Science of Dynamics in the Seventeenth Century (1971) and Mary Hesse’s Forces and Fields and gave myself a thorough grounding in the history of the concept of force. I found Mary Hesse’s book a delight to read and it expanded my own horizons as a historian of science immensely. I would thoroughly recommend it to anybody who has not yet had the pleasure of reading it.

As today if the so-called Ada Lovelace Day dedicated to honouring and improving the status of women in STEM I would like to dedicate this edition of Whewell’s Gazette to the memory of one of the great female historians and philosophers of science: